The West’s activists love tyrants – as long as they hate America and Israel
From Venezuela to Iran and Gaza, Western activism excuses repression, glorifies power and abandons ordinary people
There is something obscene about watching the reaction in the West to the fall of Nicolás Maduro. As soon as the regime collapsed and the tyrant was apprehended, the usual suspects, far removed from the consequences of his brutal and oppressive rule, reached for the same, sadly predictable language. Sovereignty, imperialism, colonialism, U.S. aggression, international law. The response was automatic, confident, and entirely detached from the criminal reality Venezuelans had lived with for decades.
Ordinary Venezuelans responded differently. For many, Maduro’s removal marked the end of a regime that had delivered economic collapse, repression, violence and mass poverty. In stark contrast to reactions from Western so-called “activists”, relief was visible. There were celebrations, albeit tempered by caution and shaped by exhaustion. After years of ruin, what mattered was not abstract legal theory or procedural argument, but the possibility of change.
Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in South America. But the country was taken apart piece by piece. Under Hugo Chávez, power tightened, institutions bent, and loyalty replaced competence. Nicolás Maduro upped the ante. Repression became open and unapologetic. Corruption became the organising principle of the state. Violence and intimidation seeped into daily life. Wages lost all meaning, public services collapsed, food and medicine became scarce, and families were torn apart as millions left in search of survival. Today, roughly seventy per cent of Venezuelans live in poverty.
A “Better Way”
The Bolivarian Revolution was sold to the world as a socialist project for the poor and a defiant stand against American power and arrogance. In practice, Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, seized control of the state, removed every obstacle in their way, crushed political rivals, and turned courts, media and elections into tools of power.
They gutted the economy through corruption, incompetence and criminal activity, ruled through intimidation and violence, and drove Venezuela into collapse. Shortages of food and medicine became normal, poverty spread, and millions felt forced to flee. What emerged bore no resemblance to people-power or democracy, only the familiar architecture of authoritarian rule wrapped in revolutionary language.
Yet that language proved irresistible to much of the Western left, who embraced the revolution with the same zeal earlier generations once reserved for the Soviet Union.
UK politician Jeremy Corbyn praised Hugo Chávez for showing “a different and a better way of doing things… it’s called socialism”, promising a march toward a “better, just, peaceful and hopeful world”.
Left-wing Guardian columnist and commentator Owen Jones described Venezuela as “an inspiration to the world”, proof that “there is an alternative”, and celebrated Chávez for breaking with neoliberal dogma.
Trade union leader Len McCluskey urged Europe to “learn the obvious lessons” from a government that he claimed put ordinary people first.
These endorsements persisted even as power was seized, dissent was crushed and economic Armageddon ensued. The lived reality of ordinary Venezuelans, whose lives and country had been destroyed, was brushed aside as Western ideologues worshipped at the altar of Chávez and Maduro.
Bernie Sanders praised Chávez for implementing programmes that “helped the poor”, holding Venezuela up as evidence that socialism could work.
Naomi Klein went further, describing Chávez’s Venezuela as “one of the most exciting democratic experiments in the world”, a model of popular resistance to capitalism.
As with earlier admirers of failed revolutionary states, the language of hope and justice endured long after reality on the ground turned ugly. The people living under the system were reduced to background noise, useful when they served the narrative, inconvenient when they contradicted it.
The Iranian Connection
Maduro did not merely preside over decline. He drove it. He ran the state as a criminal operation. Elections were ignored, institutions were stripped of independence, and opposition figures were jailed, exiled or silenced. His government was formally accused of operating as a narco-state, embedding itself with organised crime and turning Venezuela into a hub for illegal trafficking and illicit finance. Power served the regime, not the people.
This didn’t just hollow out Venezuela. It bound the regime into a wider ecosystem of criminal and strategic allies led by Iran. Isolated and heavily sanctioned, Tehran found in Caracas a reliable partner for sanctions evasion and covert cooperation.
Iranian state airlines ran regular flights between Iran and Venezuela with opaque cargo and passenger manifests beyond meaningful oversight. Iran helped establish weapons and drone factories on Venezuelan soil. The mullahs — or more accurately, the IRGC — provided technical expertise and used the relationship to extend intelligence, logistics and operational reach deep into the Western Hemisphere. Essentially, Venezuela served as a conduit and facilitator for the illegal and criminal activities of Iran and its proxies.
Networks linked to Hezbollah used the country and its neighbours to launder money, traffic drugs, and move illicit funds through well-documented pipelines identified by U.S. and regional authorities. Drug revenues flowed through these networks to support Hezbollah’s operations and wider Iranian objectives. Elements connected to Hamas also benefited from the same ecosystem, drawing on shared fundraising, logistics and financial channels sustained by organised crime.
Iran may or may not have run drug cartels itself, but it certainly enabled, protected and profited from networks that did, folding narcotics trafficking, weapons production and sanctions evasion into a single system of power, influence and survival.
Then Iran itself
Across Iran, protests have erupted repeatedly, driven by small merchants, workers, students and families crushed by the same corruption, inflation and repression seen in Venezuela — but with a radical religious twist.
This is an oppressed population pushing back, fully aware of the consequences. Women have stood at the forefront for years, defying a system that polices bodies and enforces obedience through fear. Their struggle sits within a broader, sustained demand for dignity and freedom. The current protests were triggered by inflation, the collapse of the Iranian currency and economic meltdown but quickly spread due to wider suffering and deep discontent with the mullahs.
The Iranian state has answered with violence. Protesters have been beaten, shot, arrested and killed. Thousands have been detained. Courts dispense punishment rather than justice. Prisons swallow dissenters. The risks of resistance are clear. Ordinary Iranians continue regardless.
This courage attracts little sustained attention from Western activists. As with Venezuela, Iran’s posture as an anti-Western, anti-Israel power grants its rulers indulgence while their victims are treated as an inconvenience. Resistance only inspires admiration when it aligns with an approved worldview and narrative.
Gaza Completes the Pattern
Hamas controls Gaza through force. It crushes opposition, steals aid and manufactures hunger as a PR strategy. It sacrifices its own population to maintain power. Resources meant for ordinary people are diverted to tunnels, weapons and fighters. Those who challenge the system are dealt with severely. Gazans live under a genocidal terrorist regime that treats their lives as expendable.
That reality is obscured abroad. Western activists repeat Hamas’ claims, rationalise its framing and amplify false narratives, rarely pausing to question Hamas’ brutal and oppressive rule. Western complicity strengthens Hamas and encourages it to continue unchanged, ensuring ordinary Gazans remain trapped and continue to suffer. Their suffering is endlessly invoked but rarely confronted at its source.
Across the West, oppressive regimes in Venezuela, Iran and Gaza are glorified and romanticised. Their language is adopted, their crimes rationalised, minimised or denied altogether, and their symbols worn with pride.
From the comfort of liberal democracies, the West’s “justice warriors” perform moral outrage while indulging authoritarianism, repression and terror, provided it targets the West – and particularly the United States and Israel.
What happens on the ground matters less than how the cause makes them feel. Prison, torture, hunger, fear, stolen elections, stolen aid – even the executed and disappeared – are treated as background noise. The lived reality of ordinary people under these oppressive and criminal regimes is cast aside in favour of a warped worldview.
It is hardly surprising that the same keffiyeh-draped activists who flood Western streets week after week to denounce Israel, and increasingly to incite openly against Jews, are absent when ordinary Iranians risk their lives confronting the Islamic regime. There are no marches for those beaten, imprisoned or killed. No chants for women dragged from the streets. No appetite for causes that demand courage rather than posture.
Yet those same activists quickly and eagerly reappear when a brutal dictator like Maduro is removed, eager to condemn the United States and defend a tyrannical regime that ruled with disastrous consequences, causing immense suffering and deprivation.
Assured in their righteous indignation, they cite international law, process and procedure, because in this instance bureaucratic frameworks trump facts on the ground. The voices of ordinary Venezuelans – celebrating his removal and the chance to end years of suffering – barely register. Reality disrupts the script.
The Usual Suspects
When that reality becomes impossible to ignore, blame shifts direction — to the go-to scapegoat, the oldest and most convenient throughout history.
It’s the Jews. Israel. The Zionists.
Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s vice-president and one of Nicolás Maduro’s most senior enforcers, reacted to his removal by claiming the U.S. operation carried “Zionist undertones.” In separate remarks, she described it as having a “Zionist tint”, reaching instinctively for conspiracy rather than engaging with the regime’s record or the reaction of Venezuelans who had lived under it.
Others imply it more carefully – or not – but the reflex is the same. Conspiracy replaces lived experience with theory and accountability with abstraction. It takes hold in sympathetic circles. It protects ideology and worldview, no matter how many lives it distorts or discards. Sacrifices must be made.
That is what is truly obscene here: the willingness to elevate ideology above real people, above genuine victims and destroyed lives – and then call it virtue.
- Gary Cohen is a filmmaker and writer. His substack can be found here.
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